The canceling society or literature as the incancelable

Abstract

Thinking about the issue of canceling invites us to open a reflective range, because many dots build this phenomenon. The notion, punitive from its etymology, has shifted from the universe of events (“cancel a party”) to human relations (“cancel a person”). This problem is linked to the process of digitalization of the world, because internet is source and stage for canceling. The web causes a noticeable reduction in language, which facilitates a vigorous far-right mentality. Members of historically marginalized groups have always had identity components as drivers of identification and resistance, using them for living together in differences and for transformative actions. However, a predominantly online activism replicates practices of the new authoritarian populism, which, in turn, also takes advantage of identity, but vaguely and performatively, as a segregationist mantra. It causes the assumption, by people more or less close to the left, of an idea of moral superiority, which governs exercises of surveillance and annulment of various divergences – mostly in the space, close for real debates, of internet, which propels us to an individualistic spectacle eager for symbolic gains (likes, brief compliments). When canceling reaches literature, it tends to, in addition to constraining debates, harm the equality that literary text proposes between writer and reader. Literature overcomes form/content scheme, bets on a becoming that canceling constrains, although abject contents in literary works can always be deplored.